AC Ryan PlayOn!HD 1TB and Mini review -
Product Showcase

Product Showcase

As stated we'll cover two products in this article, the Playon!HD 1TB and Playon!HD Mini -- to the left the Mini, to the right the unit with the 1 TB HDD built in.

The bundled items for both products are definitely extensive. Next to the PlayOn!HD unit you'll receive a very decent media remote control with batteries, a manual, power adapter, USB cable, component and composite cables and a good quality braided HDMI cable (1.3).

The media remote is IR based and covers all the functionality, selecting chapters, fast forward, next, stop, play menu, setup, the entire spectrum of functionality that you may expect from a media remote control. One little remark here, being a remote control it would have been nice to have UV reflective buttons, that would very handy in the dark. The layout could have been a little more intuitive as well though, overall it's decent and gets the job done well.

If you like to stream your content over your network from say a shared drive on your PC or over a NAS server you could do this wireless. Though we recommend wired Ethernet, you can opt for a Wireless N WiFi dongle as well. Fairly cheap, you should be able to pick one up for roughly 20 EUR.

AC Ryan Veolo ReviewThe market is continuously changing, the biggest trend last year where tablets, Android entered the market and that certainly changed the balance of smart phones. The concept proofs that you can do a lot of stuff with very little hardware, yet it remains intuitive. With that concept in mind AC Ryan started developing a new media hub slash player, in fact I shouldn't call it a media-player really as it is much more then that. The end product is called the Veolo.
The Veolo is AC Ryan's version of a media 'HUB' powered by Android 2.2 (Froyo).

AC Ryan PlayOn!HD 2 1TB reviewThe interesting thing about the PlayOnHD series 2 media-players is that they come standard with the new and very much improved GUI but also hardware wise harbor the latest Realtek 1185 chipset, and that changes a thing or two as the performance issues we had noticed in 1080P content playback (with very high bit-rate) are now a thing of the past. That Realtek 1185 chipset has an increased clock frequency, 500 MHz coming from 400 MHz on the original version. And it makes all the difference. Meanwhile AC Ryan started to further improve on the PlayOn!HD 2 as you'll spot a USB 3.0 slave port which you can use to quickly play back from or transfer files.

AC Ryan PlayOn!HD 1TB and Mini reviewToday we test the Playon!HD 1TB and Playon!HD Mini with new updated firmware, both products are media streamers, they can sniff your network for photo's, music, but most of all these little kits are specialized high-definition content playback up-to 1080P, and that's where stuff gets interesting.